Review (sort of): White Space (Dark Passages #1) by Ilsa J. Bick

First, thanks to Edelweiss and Egmont USA Publishing for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  Second, the reason I am calling this "sort of" a review is because I haven't actually finished the book yet.  I've only made it a little over halfway through the 560 pages.  The problem is I was having so much trouble reading the format of the e-galley that I decided to just review how I liked the book so far, and wait to finish it with an actual copy of the book when I could really get into it.  The print in the e-galley was so small, and the only way to make it bigger was to use my hand and kind of swipe it bigger.  But then when I went to turn the page, it went back to the small size again, and I would have to re-enlarge it.  And, if I didn't make it smaller before I turned the page, then it took a long time to go to the next page as well as being smaller.  So I kept being interrupted every time I tried to go on to the next page, and there were some really intense moments that I didn't want to be interrupted as I needed to know what was happening next, and quickly!

I would compare this story to what I imagine H.P. Lovecraft stories are like.  I've not read any, I don't think, but it seems like the monsters remind me of the images you see of "Lovecraftian" monsters.  And it definitely reminds me of a Stephen King novel, one of his really dark ones, like It, one of my favorites.  I do really prefer to kind of know sometimes ahead of times what is going on, and in a way, you're kind of finding your way along the story with the characters, but it is done in a really good way.  It is a totally different kind of story than the author's first series, The Ashes Trilogy, but I loved that, and so far I'm pretty intrigued by this story as well.

The characters are all flawed it seems, they have something to hide, something about them that could change the way the people they are meeting would feel about being around them.  And while we kind of know with some of them, you slowly learn more as the story goes on. There are two characters, soldiers, that I kind of figured out a little of their back story before it really began to unfold, but I'm not saying that in a bad way, I was just thinking it was what it was going to be, and then it was!

I definitely recommend this book, but as it is over 500 pages, same as the first trilogy, you have to be ready to pick it up and just get sucked in, and just go with it.  I can't wait till it comes out, probably enough that I will have to go ahead and buy it right away so that I can finish reading it.  But we'll see how broke I am this week.